The Star Wars Phenomenon

(N.B. This is a discussion of the music, not the film. For the record, I'm not a fan of the latest installment.)

There is quite an argument going on (of which I am a part) over at the pages of Slipped Disc over the sales of The Force Awakens soundtrack to that of "classical" music. While this recording sold over 90,000 copies in the U.S. last week, the blogger (Norman Lebrecht) states that "classical" recordings totaled significantly less, "The top 25 classical albums put together sold just under 9,000 copies in the US, the world’s largest market, according to Nielsen Soundscan."

Prokofiev: HE wrote film music!

Of course, this brings up the argument of what exactly is meant by the term "classical." Incidental music by composers such as Mendelssohn, Grieg, Bizet and others is classical and film scores are not. Even if they're written by Prokofiev or Shostakovich? What of the theater? Merry Widow is performed at the Met while the Chicago Lyric is denigrated for presenting Broadway musicals. What makes one art and the other fluff? Zauberflote has much more spoken dialogue than Les Miserables, but, again, one is suitable for the opera stage and the other relegated to the Great White Way.

Oscar Hammerstein's daddy,
also named Oscar...

Oscar Hammerstein I, father of the most prolific (and popular) librettists of his time, was very active in his early career building opera houses. The 1906 Manhattan Opera House (his eighth such theatre), successfully challenged productions at the Met, while his Philadelphia Opera House (1908) still stands, although in a state of serious disrepair due to neglect. But I digress.

Maybe it's important to note the precursors that inspired John Williams in Star Wars and his other film scores. Violinist Timothy Judd writes (and I agree):

     "The music of Wagner and Star Wars are both fundamentally motivic. Connections and associations with characters and ideas are made frequently through leitmotifs. These are often fleeting references which suddenly emerge out of the deeply contrapuntal fabric of the music and quickly dissolve. But they occur at crucial moments, and powerfully influence the way we perceive the drama. Listen to the way Princess Leia’s theme is transformed. Keep listening, and you’ll hear an interesting reference to Bela Bartok’s Miraculous Mandarin. Fast forward to this lushly romantic music from The Force Awakens (Han and Leia) and you’ll hear similar leitmotifs in succession. A battle takes place between leitmotifs in an excerpt, heard later in The Force Awakens (music vaguely reminiscent of the first movement of Mahler’s Third Symphony).
     John Williams’ influences extend beyond Mahler and Bartok to include most of the significant composers of the twentieth century, from Shostakovich to Stravinsky. For example, compare this recurring motive and this moment towards the end of Howard Hanson’s Second Symphony. Or listen to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana and compare it with Duel Of The Fates from The Phantom Menace. In Han Solo Returns from Return of the Jedi, Williams slips into the eerie atonality of Schoenberg, with a hint of late-Mahler angst. At times, he captures the hazy, shimmering exoticism of Alan Hovhaness. Beyond the regal Throne Room music at the end of the first movie, Williams’ trademark closely-voiced brass bell tones and swirling string and woodwind lines owe a lot to William Walton’s Crown Imperial March. Then, there are the obvious similarities between the Star Wars main title music and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 1941 score for the film, Kings Row. The Force Awakens score occasionally evokes the sense of timeless mystery we hear in "Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age" and "Neptune, the Mystic" from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite, The Planets."

The point I am trying to make is that the music from The Force Awakens can be an important "gateway" into the world of classical music. I owned the 2-disc LP set of the original Star Wars soundtrack long before I saw the film. It wasn't long after that however, that I began to experience, mostly in live performance, the music of Mahler, Debussy, Prokofiev, and much, much more. The rest is (my) history.